Lawrence Block - The Burglar in the Library

“Not Princess Margaret.”

“ Bern -”

“Lady Jane Grey,” I said. “Or Anne Boleyn.”

“Who cares? The point is-”

“I get the point.”

“So?”

“I almost slipped,” I said. “I almost let out what I really am.”

“What you really…”

“I almost said I was a bookseller.”

“But fortunately you caught yourself at the last minute and told her you were a burglar.”

“Right.”

“Am I missing something here?”

“Think about it,” I said.

She did, and after a long moment light dawned. “Oh,” she said.

“Right.”

“There’s a million books in the damn house,” she said, “and most of them are old, and some of them are sure to be rare. And if they knew there was a bookseller in their midst-”

“They’d be on guard,” I said. “At the very least.”

“Whereas knowing they’ve got a burglar on the premises gives them a nice cozy warm feeling.”

“I didn’t want to say ‘bookseller’,” I said, “and I had to do something quick, and I wanted to stay with the same initial.”

“Why? Monogrammed luggage?”

“My lips were already forming a B.”

“‘A butcher, a baker, a bindlestaff maker.’ All of them start with B, Bernie, and they all sound more innocent than ‘burglar.’”

“I know.”

“It’s a good thing her lips are sealed.”

“Yeah, right. She already told Mummy. But you don’t think Mummy believed it, do you?”

“She thought you were joking with the kid.”

“And so will anyone else she happens to tell. As far as that goes, do you really think Millicent thought I’d come here to steal the spoons? She assumed it was a gag and she was happy to go along with it. When anyone presses the point, I’ll let it be known that you and I work together at the Poodle Factory. What’s the matter?”

“ Bern, don’t take this the wrong way, but I never had a partner and I never will.”

“It’s just a story to let out, Carolyn.”

“I mean it’s not much, the Poodle Factory, but it’s mine, you know?”

“So I’m your employee. Is that better?”

“A little bit. The thing is, what do you know about washing dogs? I’m the last person to compare it to rocket science, but it’s like any other trade. There’s a lot of information involved, and if you should happen to come up against a pet owner who’s familiar with what goes on at a dog-grooming salon, it might blow your cover.”

“I’m just helping out,” I said. “I lost my job, and now I’m helping you at the salon while I wait for something to open up in my own field.”

“And what’s that, Bern?”

“I’ll think of something, okay?”

“Hey, don’t bite my head off, Bernie.”

“Sorry.”

“You know what’s funny?”

“Hardly anything.”

“ Bern -”

“What’s funny?”

“Well,” she said, “remember when you bought Barnegat Books from Mr. Litzauer? You were a big reader, and you always liked books, and you figured owning a bookstore would be a good front. You could pretend to be a bookseller while you went on breaking into houses.”

“So?”

“So now you’re pretending to be a burglar,” she said, “while you chase around after old books. Don’t you think that’s funny?”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s a riot.”

From the library we went through another parlor, winding up in something called the Morning Room. Maybe it was situated to catch the morning sun, or maybe it was where you took your second cup of coffee after breakfast. (It wasn’t where you had breakfast. That’s what the Breakfast Room was for.)

In the Morning Room we met Gordon Wolpert, a fiftyish fellow dressed all in brown. He was a widower, we learned, and he was on the seventh day of a ten-day stay. “But I might extend it,” he said. “It’s a spectacular house, and the kitchen is really quite remarkable. Did you arrive in time for dinner? Well, then you know what I mean. I’m putting on weight, and I can’t honestly say I give a damn. Maybe I’ll have my clothes let out and become a permanent resident, like the colonel.”

“Colonel Buller-Blount? He lives here all the time?”

“Blount-Buller, actually. And I guess it’s not accurate to call him a permanent guest. He stays here half the year.”

“And spends the other half in England? I suppose it must have something to do with taxes.”

“It has everything to do with taxes, but he doesn’t spend a minute in England. He told me he hasn’t been there in years. Hates the place.”

“Really? He’s the most English person I ever met in my life.”

Wolpert grinned. “With the possible exception of young Millicent,” he said. “As a matter of fact, it’s his Englishness that makes him stay away. He can’t stand what’s become of the country. He says they’ve ruined it.”

“They?”

“A sort of generic ‘they,’ from the sound of it. He wants the England he remembers from boyhood, and he has to come here to Cuttleford House for it.”

Carolyn wanted to know where he spent the other six months.

“Six months and a day, actually. In Florida. That way he doesn’t have to pay any state income tax, and I think there are other tax savings as well.”

“Oh, sure,” she said. “A lot of New Yorkers do the same thing. Hey, wait a minute. Hasn’t he got it backwards?” She waved a hand at the window, on the other side of which the snow continued to fall. “It’s winter. What’s he doing up here?”

“The colonel reverses the usual order of things,” Wolpert said. “He comes north during the fall foliage season and heads south in April. That way the old boy is always paying the low off-season rates.”

“That’s the good news,” I said. “The bad news is he never gets decent weather.”

“That’s the whole point.”

“It is?”

“Remember, he’s looking to recapture the rapture. Winter here reminds him of happy boyhood hours on the moors, chasing the wily grouse or whatever you do on the moors. And Florida in the summer puts him in mind of his years in Her Majesty’s Service, most of which seem to have been spent in one tropical hellhole or another.”

“That’s perverse,” Carolyn said.

“The English word for it is ‘eccentric,’” Wolpert said. “He’s got the worst of both worlds, but evidently it works for him. I suppose you could say that he’s like the proverbial fellow with one foot in a bucket of boiling water and the other in a bucket of ice water. On the average, he’s perfectly comfortable.”

I wondered what kind of work Gordon Wolpert did that gave him the option of extending his stay. I might have asked, but that would only have invited the same question in return, and I hadn’t yet decided how to respond.

So we talked about some of the other guests instead, and about Cuttleford House and its staff. Wolpert had met the Misses Dinmont and Hardesty, but he hadn’t had much chance to size them up. “The one looks as though she’d be trying to get everybody out on the Great Lawn for field hockey if it weren’t for the snow,” he said. “And the other has a Magic Mountain air about her, doesn’t she?”

“ Magic Mountain?” Carolyn said. “You mean the theme park?”

“The Thomas Mann novel,” I said gently. “The one set at the sanitarium. Do you think Miss Dinmont has TB?”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with her,” he said. “Not TB, I wouldn’t think, but most likely something else with initials. She just seems to me to have the air of somebody who came here to die.”

I had that sentence echoing in my mind for a while, so I missed most of what he had to say about the Eglantines and the handful of people who worked for them-Orris, a pair of chambermaids, and the cook. We’d met Orris, for all that was worth, and hadn’t yet set eyes on the others, although the cook had made her wondrous presence known.